The Pirate Bay Tops 5 Million Registered Users

The Pirate Bay achieved a new milestone today. Just a few minutes ago the 5 millionth user created an account at the most-visited BitTorrent site on the Internet. Despite efforts from the entertainment industries that have tried to shut the site down for half a decade, The Pirate Bay keeps expanding. Let's see how they got there.

May 31, 2006, only two years after The Pirate Bay was founded, 65 Swedish police officers entered a datacenter in the outskirts of Stockholm. The officers were tasked with shutting down the largest threat to the entertainment industry at the time – The Pirate Bay’s servers.

In the months leading up to the raid the US Government threatened to put Sweden on the WTO’s black list if they refused to deal with the Pirate Bay problem. Even the MPAA was involved, with John Malcolm, Executive Vice President of the MPAA, writing a letter to Sweden’s Secretary of State in which he stated, “It is certainly not in Sweden’s best interests to earn a reputation among other nations and trading partners as a place where utter lawlessness with respect to intellectual property rights is tolerated.”

The pressure worked and The Pirate Bay’s servers went down, but to the disappointment of the entertainment industries this only lasted for three days. Instead of calling it quits The Pirate Bay founders fought back, and in an ironic twist all the attention from the press due to legal troubles helped grow the site to what it is today – the largest BitTorrent site on the Internet. Apparently it’s easier to overthrow governments than to take a website down.

At the time of the raid The Pirate Bay had only a few hundred thousand registered users, but with the spotlight on the deviant Swedes, the user count soon skyrocketed. At the start of July 2006 the site broke the magical milestone of one million registered users, and that was just the beginning.

Today, despite numerous court cases, blocking attempts by ISPs and two full trials at the Stockholm Court, The Pirate Bay has welcomed its 5 millionth user. Quite a remarkable achievement for a site that doesn’t even require registration to download. Day in and day out, a few thousand new users sign up for an account at the most-visited BitTorrent site.

There is of course also a downside to the ever growing list of users, as the site’s popularity also makes it a huge target for spammers who want to pass off their fake torrents pointing to malware. TorrentFreak talked to one of the Pirate Bay moderators, who said that indeed hundreds of ‘spam’ accounts and fake uploads have to be deleted every day.

Needless to say, without the moderator team the site would become pretty much be unusable in a matter of days. Yes, The Pirate Bay also has several algorithms to spot the obvious spammers, but even after this first screening hundreds of torrents have to be removed manually.

The current moderator team exists of about 40 people, half of which are full moderators and the other half so-called ‘helpers’. Together these people remove numerous fake torrents and spam accounts every day, abiding to a strict take-down policy that does not cover copyrighted material.

The big question is whether the site will live to welcome its 10 millionth user in a few years from now. The community and moderators – who all work for free – is certainly large enough, but the pressure from the entertainment industry on ISPs and governments is ever increasing. But then again, this never stopped The Pirate Bay before.